Zeppelin raids

The Zeppelin raids was a strategic bombing campaign waged against the United Kingdom by the German Empire from 19 January 1915 to 5 August 1918 during World War I. German zeppelin airships launched 51 raids on the British Isles, killing 557 people and injuring 1,358; the Germans dropped more than 5,000 bombs on Britain and caused £1.5 million in damage, while also disrupting Allied munitions output.

Background
Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, a former German cavalry officer, developed his first airship, LZ1, in 1900. Zeppelin became a generic term for all lighter-than-air craft.

The possibility of airships attacking cities with bombs was widely imagined before World War I - appearing, for example, in H.G. Wells' 1908 fantasy novel The War in the Air - and was discussed by senior German commanders.

Germany had acquired a dozen metal-framed Zeppelin and wooden-framed Schutte-Lanz rigid airships by the outbreak of the war. Other combatants used a range of rigid airships and nonrigid airships known as "blimps", but Germany was well ahead of them in this field.

History
Deployed by the Imperial German Army and Imperial German Navy from the start of the war, airships proved effective in a naval reconnaissance role, and the idea of also using them to bomb targets in Britain fascinated German military commanders. Kaiser Wilhelm had qualms about authorizing bombing raids on Britain, but was led by stages to lift restrictions on airship operations. Mounting a bombing campaign was, however, no easy matter. The airships' huge bulk and slow speed - the largest were 650 feet long and travelled at 50-60 mph - made them vulnerable to being shot down. To prevent this, attacks were made at night, but this posed a challenge to navigators, especially after Britain and France introduced blackouts. In addition, airships required favorable weather. Many missions were aborted because of poor weather or operating problems such as engine failure.

Bombing Britain
The campaign against Britain began with attacks on England's east coast towns in January 1915. London was bombed for the first time on 31 May and raids later spread to the Midlands and northeast England. Captain Peter Strasser, head of Germany's airship fleet, imagined Britain being overcome by "extensive destruction of cities, factory complexes, dockyards..." But Germany never had mayn airships - 16 took part in the largest raid of the war - and their bomb load was modest. In total, 51 airship raids on Britain are estimated to have killed 556 people, and damaged to buildings and other infrastructure was limited. The moral impact was out of all proportion to the material effect. British civilians felt fear and outrage at being attacked in their homes. politicians responded to public opinion by switching resources from the Western Front to home defense. Fighter aircraft were brought back from the front to intercept the raiders, and London was ringed with searchlights and antiaircraft guns in an effort to repel the airships.

Air attacks were mounted, with some success, against Zeppelin sheds in Belgium and Germany. Through 1916, the airships faced more losses. In February, two were shot down by antiaircraft fire over the French city of Nancy. In June, an airship returning from an abortive raid on Britain was destroyed over Belgium when a British pilot dropped bombs on its gas bag.

Deflated and defeated
The development of incendiary rounds made it easier for airplanes to attack airships. On the night of 2 September, Lieutenant William Leefe Robinson, flying a BE2c biplane, shot down airship SL11 within sight of London. By the year's end, five more airships had been shot down over Britain by ground fire or pursuit aircraft.

These were unsustainable losses for Germany. Refusing to abandon the campaign, the German navy lightened its airships to make them "height-climbers", operating at altitudes that airplanes could not reach. This made them invulnerable to enemy action but problematic for their crews, who were flying at over 16,000 feet in unheated, unpressurized craft. Five "height-climbers" were lost in a single mission against Britain in October 1917. The airship bombing campaign had in effect been defeated.

Aftermath
Airplanes began to replace airships in bombing campaigns against Britain, though airships were still sometimes used to transport supplies. Germany revitalized its bomibng campaign against Britain and France in summer 1917 by using Gotha airplanes instead of airships, inflicting more damage at lower cost. Occasional airship raids on Britain continued until August 1918, when German naval airship chief Peter Strasser was killed in an attack across the North Sea. Germany was banned from possessing military airships after the war under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, but in the 1920s it resumed its lead in commercial ligher-than-air flights. By World War II, all countries had abandoned airships as impractical.